Superboy and the Invisible Girl
by ILoVeWicked
Summary: Living life in the shadows of her big brother has not been easy for Maggie Montgomery, but she learns through the examples of her family and years of complaining that nobody is perfect. Oneshot based on episode 3.17. Rated T for safety.


**Superboy and the Invisible Girl**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.**

When I was five, I fell off of the monkey bars.

I distinctly remember that they were the monkey bars, because I recall the unmistakable swelling in my heart as my eyes locked on the platform at the other side of the playground. Somehow, I must have blurred out the slipping of my tiny fingers and an eternity of sprawling through the September air for my own sake. Knees scraped and hopes crushed, I recall letting out the most piercing yelp and beginning to bawl once my body made contact with the woodchips. It the typical seven-year-old girl's reaction.

My eight-year-old brother, the third grade wiffleball star who was supposed to be supervising me, excused himself from his important neighborhood championship game and carried me the entire, silent four blocks home.

The only thing he must have said, because I would remember if he had said anything at all to me in our childhood years, was, "Boy, they're gonna be mad when they see that you ruined your new stockings."

My scrawny big brother was praised for using his unknown muscles, and as he had predicted, I got the scolding of a lifetime for ruining the purple stockings in which I was supposed to wear to Grammy's dinner.

Emotions tied as tightly as my red ponytail, I hated my brother for being right. For lying about the fact that he had not been keeping a watchful eye on me, I despised him even more. My older sibling had worked way too hard to get the right to go to the playground unsupervised, and the thrill clearly died down when he learned that he would be responsible for his little sister, tagging along with him again. The blatant plastic bat gripped in his long fingers did nothing to convince my parents that the stocking ripping could have been easily avoided if he had not been spending his time 'being one of the boys'. No matter how hard I pleaded for my voice to be heard, there was no wrong doing when it came to Superboy.

Superboy. That's what I called him in secret. Not because he was anything special, just because he was so made out to be that way to just about everybody: family members, teachers, you name it. I was constantly shrouded in the shadows of my big brother. Even my friends idolized that lanky kid who would always to me just be my brother.

Seriously, he was nothing to squawk over. Unmanageable brown locks, bright blue eyes that always seemed to be slanted like a cat's, and naturally tanned skin directly contrasted my thin layer of red stringy hair, buggy chocolate brown eyes, and pallid complexion.

As for me, I like to think of myself as the Invisible Girl. I had no gift or talent—at least none that went noticed—besides blending into the background where I belonged. I had grown up accustomed to being the one who got passed the baton after my brother rather than the one who took the lead.

It took some adapting for me to harness my powers for good. At first, I had tried to get myself noticed in any way possible in hopes to feel like an equal in my life: getting myself into trouble in my house, failing school on purpose, and countless attempts at running away from the suburbs of Los Angeles were only a select few among my infinite bombed plots to get attention. All it ever amounted to was an hour's worth of scolding and I was sent off to go play with my toys.

My tactics shifted in my early teens from grabbing negative attention to aiming to impress. I started actually using my brain when it came time for high school, landing myself in all AP classes and excelling in extracurricular activities like the lacrosse team and the school play. People started noticing me, but for all the wrong reasons. At least when I hung back, I never had to worry about being compared to my older brother.

Now that I posed an actual threat, things changed. If I scored a 94 on an impossible geometry test, my brother would have gotten a 100. If I scored a goal in a game, my brother had scored five at his. If I landed a supporting role in a school show, my brother had already been cast as the lead.

Either way, noticed or unnoticed, I ended up with the short end of the stick. Countless times I would accomplish something great and feel empty, because I knew he had already done something significantly greater. Riding the coattails of a person I could hardly call family sucked.

All dramatizations aside, my parents were not totally negligent to me. They were both busy, highly qualified doctors that hardly had time for either of us, but when they did have an hour or two to spare one night, they did their best to wager it fairly between both of their children.

I spent most of my time bonding with Mom, considering Dad always found a way to weasel himself out of the democratic system they were supposed to uphold as working parents. I am the carbon copy of my mother, minus her beautiful crystal blue eyes that my brother naturally seemed to inherit and the air of grace about her which I clearly lacked.

My mom was the standard idea of a mother, taking me and my brother out on the weekends she had off, reading me classic bedtime stories, and dealing out discipline when necessary. Yet, there was always an unwritten, unspoken connection between my mother and I that went deeper than what glimmered at the surface of our relationship. There was something entrancing about how telepathically mom and I were toward each other. She read me like a book that only showed what was between the lines, and I did the same for her. Sure, we weren't the Gilmore Girls, confiding every miniscule detail of our lives to each other and acting more like buddies than mother and daughter, but we were a force to be reckoned with.

My father was a completely different story than my mother was. As much as he made an effort to openly display his love for me the way he did for my brother, I could see in his carefully crafted face that it was a struggle. Instead of the praise and affection my brother earned from Dad by doing absolutely nothing, I received my fatherly love in the form of scolding. It seemed like the only interaction I had with my father were the long lectures that went on forever because he was too frustrated with me to talk. By the time I had stopped misbehaving on purpose, we fell completely out of contact.

When I was fifteen, I wanted to go on a trip to the beach with my best friend Lucy. We had been born only five months apart and had grown up best friends since our families were so close. Lucy's parents had been young when they had her, and they had granted her whatever liberties she desired throughout her life. She could practically get away with murder, and therefore calmly explained that a constant party fest at her grandparent's condo in San Francisco with half the population of our school—most of which didn't even know I existed—would be just fine with her folks.

It came as no surprise to either of us when they allowed us to go to Lucy's grandparent's condo by ourselves, and that they were even more thrilled when they learned that we would have company. They even offered to drive us. Lucy's parents were a small divot in the road compared to convincing my parents to let us go. Of course, we left out the small detail to my parents that the condo would be packed with hormonal teenagers and that Lucy's parents were merely dropping us off. I carefully inserted eye lash taunting and whining wherever necessary while trying to sway my parents, and yet they still did not budge on their conviction that both me and best friend, who they knew better than I did, were not ready to handle this roadtrip road trip.

I had to do it. I _needed _to go to San Francisco for Spring Break, and if I didn't, I would very well be the laughing stock of my school. It killed me to play such a card with my not-so-feeble parents, but it presented itself as my only option. It wasn't until I argued, "But Luke goes out with his friends all the time by himself!" that my mother finally stepped down. Lucy could barely contain her excitement as she gripped at my arm. It looked like smooth cruising from that point on. Dad, however, caused me and Lucy to hit a roadblock.

He would not let me go. That was his big convincing argument. To back it up, he protested that he 'smelled something fishy' about this Spring Break trip. My mother tried to reason with him, and my brother even tried to butter him up a bit by explaining how responsible I was. I, for the first time, went against the Daddy-Daughter silent treatment we usually gave each other and erupted in his face. Right in front of every honorable person in my life, my mother, father, brother, and best friend, I cried and kicked and told my father how much I hated him. Lucy went to San Francisco the next day and I stayed locked in my room, face blotchy from a night's worth of self-pity induced sobbing.

Three days later, it was on the news that a paper lantern in the condo had caught fire during a wild party and the entire complex had set fire. Lucy and many others made it out alive, but several of the students I knew but never gave me the time of day had burnt to death.

I hugged my father for the first time in two years that day, and the silence was broken.

"Maggie," he whispered, "if I had lost you…if I had said yes…"

"I know, Daddy," thanking God for giving him the premonition and the guts to smell something fishy. "You have a really good nose."

Up until the San Francisco incident, I never understood what repelled my own father to me or what made him love my brother more. I had always been aware of the holes in the tattered shirt my family wore, but it wasn't until I learned what had shred and torn at that shirt that I truly understood just why he couldn't look at me without frowning or express doting emotions my mother possessed toward me.

* * *

There must be something about a prestigious medical award ceremony that brings out the most closeted secrets and most carefully avoided conversations in families. I sit alone at my table with an untouched glass of champagne. With twisted nostalgia, I reminisce those childhood memories—the monkey bars and the failed San Francisco trip standing out amongst them—that have molded me into what I am today: a recent graduate of Princeton University, a teacher for a junior high American Literature class outside of the city, and for once in my life, taking the road less traveled by. My brother went to Yale and is now a surgical resident at Mercy West Hospital in Washington; the usual 'anything you can do I can do better' thing is still in effect.

The looming sense of having to share these unwanted tales lingers around the room, which is filled to the brim with doctors dressed to the nines in colorless patterns that make my bright yellow dress stick out like sore thumb. Then again, I muse, the hair, or the name, would give me away anyhow.

"Margaret Forbes Montgomery-Wilder!" a elderly woman I think I've seen before, husband linked to her arm and precious jewels clinging to wherever skin was present around her shabby gray dress exclaims, using my full name, as she approaches me. I rise with as much poise as my two left feet and constricting dress will let me and greet her customarily with a peck on each of her cheeks and a light hug before she inhales deeply and takes in my tall frame.

"Why, I haven't seen you since you were this big!" the woman chirped, her free hand leveling off at her knee. "My, how beautiful you've grown. Henry, hasn't she grown?"

The old man reluctantly looks away from the open bar in the distance and smiles quickly. "Yes, Annie, she has," he remarks sarcastically.

Annie throws her head back and laughs gaily, her bedazzled earrings reflecting off of whatever dim light they can catch in the ballroom. "Ugh, you are simply beautiful, just like your mother. Speaking of the guest of honor…how thrilling is it to see your mother win a William White Award of Clinical Excellence?"

I force a small smile against my tight pink lips, for talking about my family and their accomplishments is a long list on which my name does not appear very frequently. "Oh, Annie, it's quite exciting. It's simply wonderful to see my mother being rewarded for her hard work," I gush, much to Annie's pleasure.

"That's fantastic! You know, your mother saved my daughter's life _years _ago! Oh, it was a while back, and my little girl was a surrogate for a couple's triplets when she learned that there would be complications. Some bonehead doctor made a bad move and my Kayla went into a coma, and it seemed to our family that all hope was lost forever. But your mother, bless her heart, would not give up. She found a way to save my baby and that dreadful couple's babies. We visited her at Oceanside whenever possible before we moved to New Jersey. It's about time she got recognized for her gifts as a surgeon."

I smile and nod along with the whole story, just about as attentive as good old Henry, who Annie is losing her grip of. She tightens her arm around her sleepy-eyed husband and grins once more.

"I better get this one to the bar before he drags me there. Have a splendid evening, Margaret! Tell your mother I said hello!" Annie bellows over the swing band as she strides gracefully off. I wave her off graciously and am about to slump back into my chair when Annie's voice catches me off guard and sends me almost sprawling across the dance floor (which no one is using):

"Oh, and Margaret, how is that darling older brother of yours? I heard he passed his intern exam. "

Well, she did it. Annie asked the dreaded question. It was only a matter of time before one of my mother's ex-patients, family members, or colleagues mentioned it. They all know what he's been up to, so why do they bother asking? Do they know the sound of my brother's name churns the acid in my stomach and the fire in my brown eyes? I grit my teeth into an agonizing smile and nod my head with curtly hostility.

"He's just _great_, Annie. My parents are so proud to see one of us following in their footsteps," I tell her, because it's what she wants to hear. Annie's smile is almost sickening. The very mentioning of my brother has given the pleasant old lady a Medusa head and a devil tail. Annie uses another interjection and happy word before her husband practically throws her in the direction of that bar.

I am fuming when I feel a surprisingly cool hand on my bare shoulder.

"Why, if it isn't Scarlett O'Hara in the flesh!" Lucas greets me tartly. He finds it necessary to hold it against me that I chose to use my smarts to go into the field of teaching middle school children English and literature, and the fact that I used to bring up _Gone with the Wind _in just about every conversation we had only gives him more motivation to irk me to no end.

I whirl around and mirror his smirk, that same smirk my father wears when he teases my mother. "Hello, Lucas. Fancy seeing you here."

"Well, it _is _Addison's big night," he retorts. All his life, he had refused to call my mother 'Mom', and simply stuck to 'Addison'. That is all she is to him. She may have been the stand in throughout his childhood, but she is not his mother. "And I was getting worried that Los Angeles missed me."

"Trust me," I mutter to myself as he plops down beside me. "It's like you never left." I know he hears this. Luke chuckles and goes to tussle the red hair that took me hours to perfect, which I artfully avoid with a quick grabbing of his wrist. Some of the sibling tension normal brothers and sisters have is awkwardly there between us, seeing as we are connected by a father and at least half of the blood that courses through our bodies is identical.

"I _am _glad you decided to take the time out of your busy surgical schedule to come down here for a few days," I drawl, settling the dust that has been up in the air since Luke was 'Cordially invited' to my mother's award ceremony. "I was beginning to worry that I would be stuck watching Aunt Naomi and Uncle Gabriel feed each other all night."

Luke grins. "I'm glad I can help," he says with a wink. I catch him in the act of surveying the room for familiar faces, particularly one. I sigh, because I understand that he has every right to be angrier with life than I am. The cards he has been dealt since the day he was born haven't exactly been a royal flush.

"She's not here, Luke," I say gently, because I know there is a flicker of boyish hope that he carries around inside of him whenever he pays a visits. He exhales slowly and grabs my champagne, downing it in record time.

"Yeah, I figured. I was just…um, looking for Uncle Coop."

I purse my lips and stare down at the hands folded in my lap to give him a moment to be disappointed. I know he came to this party for one reason, and that reason has nothing to do with watching his substitute mother win a boring award and surrounding himself with her admirers.

There isn't much time before someone catches the eye of the beloved Wilder child. "Lucas," Aunt Charlotte greets him, eleven-year-old daughter Shawnette clinging to her satiny leg while the master of destruction, Shawnette's twin brother Caleb, plants himself in Lucas' arms. The beautiful southern blonde, and my babysitter along with Uncle Cooper a countless number of times, smiles at me briefly and I return the gesture. I reside in Santa Monica; these people see me regularly. Luke, on the other hand, is a treat for the members of the practice who watched us grow.

"Aunt Charlotte! Hey!" Luke pipes up immediately, taking Charlotte for a much greater fool than she is. Behind the husky eye shadow, my Aunt's grey eyes catch Luke's falling spirits and she speaks aloud words we Montgomery-Wilders would be shunned for bringing to attention.

"Saw your mom the other day," she says, motherly tenderness that everyone but Luke's mother has regarded him with. Luke fishes around the table for more alcohol as he absentmindedly plays hand games with Caleb.

"Really? That's great!"

Charlotte catches my helpless eyes for a moment before going back to him. "She's been getting a little better over the past few years. You know, she misses you. Constantly talking about how you used to visit her all the time. You should go pay her visit since you're in town for a few days."

"Gee, Aunt Char, I don't know. I only have three days, and so many people have already asked me about plans. I'm pretty much swamped the whole weekend."

"You can make time for your mother," Charlotte snaps. Shawnette then makes the request to go dancing with Bently Wallace and his daddy Sheldon, and Charlotte can no longer argue with my obstinate older brother.

His mother is sick. She has been mentally ill ever since Lucas' birth. She had given him away to our father and hadn't felt any shred of emotion to her baby since. I suppose things would have been different if both mother and child hadn't nearly been killed in a freak accident that I have been told so little of.

My dad still held onto that hope that seeing doctors and medications would make Luke's mom better, but when she seemed to drift farther and farther, he had brief fling with my mother which resulted in me. When Luke's mom was finally ready, I was floating around in the unmistakable baby bump of my mother. The depression meds went down the toilet, the doctors went unvisited, and Violet Turner planted herself in a mental institution after attempting to kill herself.

Lucas, from the moment he could talk, comprehended that something in this façade of a family Mom and Dad created for him was off. Too young to understand the principles of post traumatic stress disorder and depression, Luke insisted to make it a weekly priority to drag our father out to the hospital to watch his listless mother stare into space. Up until I was seven, the trip went under codename "Baseball Game". Sometimes, she would recognize him, and other times, she would erupt into hysterical fits, claiming that some strange boy was staring at her. No matter how the appointment would go, Luke kept his head held high.

"She'll get better," he used to say, and by that point, the conversation had been long over before it had begun.

That all stopped when Luke was old enough to understand what made Violet so unattainable. He figured if she did not care enough to love him that he wouldn't care enough to love her. No matter who has tried to step in and take on the role of mom for him, I seemed to be the only one who could read the obvious deflation of hope in his face.

"She's not getting better, and she never will. I don't give a damn what she does anymore," he went on to say. His philosophy had taken a new turn.

My Uncle Sam takes the stage and begins speaking about my mother, and although I should be paying attention and hanging onto every word of what was sure to be one of my uncle's infamous speeches, I take the time to scrutinize Lucas.

Luke had everyone cheering him on. They could yell and scream and adore him to points that vexed me unfathomably, and yet to him, only one voice mattered in that crowd. Every single one of Luke's baseball coaches could place him at the top of the batting order every game and encourage him to go into the major leagues, but Violet would never be there to watch him score a homerun. His teachers could give him the most boast worthy of grades, but Violet would never be there to tack those grades up on the fridge. Hell, my parents and family members could hold him to the highest pedestal, but to his own mother he was a stranger.

If I am invisible, what does that make my brother?

Then, it strikes me. I've found his Superboy's weakness, his Achilles' Heel. What appears so flawless to the outside world is truly a mangled, emotion-shrouded mess on the inside. Now that I have found the drawback to this hero, I could harness this newfound power for good or for evil.

"…And so it is with the proudest honor that I, Samuel Bennet, present the William White Award for Clinical Excellence to the wonderful Addison Montgomery…"

There is an eruption of polite applause as my mother, in all her admirable beauty, makes her way to the center of the room and dives into a long acceptance speech. Not strand of red hair out of place or one wrinkle in her dress, Mom touches on the boring medical jargon and the usual Oscar winner monologue before divulging into things that are more personal.

"Although the pressure as a medical student and surgeon has always been great, I am not perfect and I never was. I never will be. For a long time, I had screwed up my life so much that all I could hold myself for was my skill in the ER. Even still, I wasn't perfect in surgery. I lost children, and I brought about many devastated parents. I never took the time to understand their pain, and that frustrated me. The thing is: I could not understand that extra bit of vital information to understanding neonatology until I had my very own child, Maggie. By watching her grow and keeping her on close radar, freaking out when the littlest of things would affect her, I learned what it meant to be a better mother, person, and doctor.

Here's to you, Sweetheart, and to everyone who has traveled along beside me through this never ending journey we all call life. I've come to learn that no one is perfect. We can come very close, but there will always be that final piece to the puzzle that fell out of the box somewhere along the way. Thank you for this honor, to the board of Medical Directors, St. Ambrose…

I sit, paralyzed as the world, once again, applauds my mother. The climax of this event has ended for most of the party goers, but I am still trying to comprehend what has just gone on in the last five minutes. Year after year, our relationship had been private, and year after year, I had only further misinterpreted what she was trying to say to me. My mother had believed in me all along. She had seen in me a special gift that no amount of competing with my brother could ever amount to. There was never any invisibility blinding my mother to her own daughter. The shield that daughter had put up had made Invisible Girl a living, breathing hoax.

For that, I had won. Not against Luke or anyone else for that matter, but against that little voice who had always planted the idea in my head that I wasn't good enough.

A smile plays at the corners of my lips as Mom pulls from her hug with Uncle Sam, shimmering award in her hands, and turns to me. She doesn't need to say anything; her eyes spell it all out. Victory against my own worst enemy, my pessimistic little self, is almost moving me to tears when someone else's loss grabs my attention.

I catch the look in his eye when the band calls for the father-daughter/mother-son dance, and I realize that using such an honest, innocent fault against my brother is something I cannot bring myself to do even in the most heated of circumstances. All my life, I had searched to break down Lucas, Heaven's Chosen child, and now that I have found the key to success, I contradict myself. The actual outcome is less of a thrill than I ever imagined in my fascination for attention.

Luke's eyes are weary as his head nods toward our father. "Well," he grumbles, "aren't you going to dance with him?" I glance over his shoulder at my father, biting my rosy lip. My dad's eyes catch my gaze, and suddenly, that telepathy I've always known to share with Mom comes across with Dad.

_Dance with him, Maggie._

I send Dad a smile before turning back to Superboy. What Mom had said in her speech was true: nobody's perfect, but people like Luke sure come close. He was just missing something: love. Not from his father, but from a woman who understands him better than anyone locked up in a coocoo's nest could.

"No, Luke. I'd like to dance with you," I chirp, the grin I've been wearing making new and unused lines across my cheeks. Luke is taken aback by my sudden change of heart, and he makes no effort to hide it.

"Mags, it's a _mother-son_ dance, and last time I checked, you're _not _my mother."

"No, but neither is Addison…or Violet for that matter."

Luke falls silent and stares out at the sea of love, slow dancing like crashing waves against our table. Shawnette is perched on Cooper's new shoes, Bently grins up at his mother Vanessa, Caleb leads Charlotte in a twisted little waltz, and Lucy's mother Maya is swaying in the strong arms of Uncle Sam.

"Look at that, Maggie. See, all mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Nowhere do I see half-siblings with crazy parents on that list. That would be some dance announcement if they did. Our family's too messed up…"

I've just about had it with his raining on my parade and jerk us both to our feet.

"Frankly, Lucas, I don't give a damn," I reply, referring back to _Gone With the Wind_. "Now, would you stop being Superboy for just three minutes?"

"...Super-what?"

"Just dance with me! Come on, I promise it won't kill you."

I reassure him with a light squeeze into his sweating palm and carry him out to the center of the dance floor. He's right. We're one dysfunctional family, each of us with flaws and cracks and insecurities that make us human.

We are far from perfect, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

**A/N: Hey there! So I've been reading around in my spare time, you know, the usual PP forum stalking and such…and I can't help but notice that the subject of Addison getting pregnant from this little rendezvous with Pete she has going on right now (which, may I just point out, I HATE) coming up an awful lot. Where I might not be head over heels for Paddison or a Paddison love child, I did enjoy Addie hanging out with Lucas and still think she would be a great mother to her own child that she has with someone else. So I figured, why not let the scenario just happen for kicks? Hence the birth of this. Let me know what you think.**

**-ILoVeWicked**


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